


The Death of a Galaxy

by Tokyo_the_Glaive



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Senator Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 17:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7901527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tokyo_the_Glaive/pseuds/Tokyo_the_Glaive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The stars are going out.<br/>It’s not happening very quickly. One standard day, there are three missing. The next, another one. The night after that, four. Small numbers, but the decrease is steady.<br/>The stars are going out, and the New Republic doesn’t have a clue as to why.</p><p>(Or, the one where there is no Snoke, and something's devouring systems whole.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Death of a Galaxy

The stars are going out.

It’s not happening very quickly. One standard day, there are three missing. The next, another one. The night after that, four. Small numbers, but the decrease is steady.

The stars are going out, and the New Republic doesn’t have a clue as to why.

“Black holes,” a senator suggests, old and decrepit. The answer doesn’t matter so much to him. Whatever the ramifications, he doesn’t have long to live.

If it were black holes, it would be obvious, but it’s not.

“Monsters,” another suggests. She’s a whimsical child, not even old enough to drink on Hosnian Prime. Her caretaker stands behind her and nods as if she’s said something sage.

 _Perhaps she has_. There are monsters yet in the galaxy, and who’s to say what survives beyond the known reaches, out in the unknown depths of the universe?

“The Force,” someone else says, though it’s dismissed almost immediately. The Force doesn’t have a will of its own. It does not take at random.

 _Of course it does_. The Force has always had a will and a way.

The Senate reaches no agreement. The New Republic continues to argue the semantics of the problem, even as reports of entire systems vanishing flood in. There are no refugees. There are no survivors. There are empty spaces where suns used to be, and radioactive detritus in the orbits of planets that ought to have existed for far longer, but there are no people to attest to what left them that way.

The galaxy goes quiet with fear.

They call it Starkiller.

* * *

The stars are going out.

Leia, who can only stand on the outskirts of the Senate, distrusted and displaced by those who think themselves above her, clutches her son close.

Han’s gone. She doesn’t know where, though she knows he yet lives. Her son almost left, too. He told her about it when he came back from Luke’s school to visit—and to tell her that he wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ go back.

“It was dark,” Ben told her quietly. “I couldn’t sleep. I heard a voice. He told me to hurt things—people. Why didn’t you bring me home?”

There was no accusation in her son’s voice, only a bitter, sad sort of resignation that belied his youth. He was so afraid. Leia had been, too.

Now, he’s still afraid, and so is she. Ben’s older—thirty, now—an upstanding Senator who often speaks on his mother’s behalf, but he’s afraid.

“I can feel them,” he tells her as the thirty-sixth star goes out.

“I can, too,” Leia says. She can feel each death like a blow to her bones. She remembers Alderaan and she mourns.

“There’s something out there,” Ben says. She hears the truth in his words—the Force speaks through him whether he wishes it or not. He’s shunned the Force and all mention of it ever since his return, and Leia’s learned not to mention it. “The Senator from Naboo was right.”

Leia wants to tell Ben that monsters aren’t real just as she wishes she had brought him home sooner— _why didn’t you bring me home?_ Oh, Ben—but they would both know the lie. Snoke, the entity responsible for Ben’s torture over years and years, was a monster. His fate, whatever had befallen him when he’d slipped away from Ben’s mind so suddenly, remains unknown to Leia. Whatever it had been, it is impossible for it to have been severe enough.

He wasn’t the only monster, though. Vader had been a peculiar sort of monster. The old Emperor, the one-time Chancellor Palpatine: he’d been one, too.

The galaxy has a long history of monstrosity.

* * *

The stars are going out.

Poe knows it’s serious because his father tells him to come home. He’s scared, after all this time. Without his wife, he’s lost faith in everything. He wants to gather the remains of his family close for the end of days. Starkiller, whatever it is, shows no signs of stopping. It’ll consume the entirety of the galaxy at the rate it’s going, and there won’t be anything left.

Poe doesn’t go home. He can’t. His mother didn’t rest even while she was pregnant and fighting a war with slim chances of survival, and Poe’s not going to besmirch her name by turning his back on a fight, never mind what it looks like.

The stars are going out, and Poe intends to find out why.

The Senate has put out a call for volunteers: they want a few brave souls to go survey the wreckage of a few of the systems that have vanished. There appears to be a pattern: stars are going out in a spiral around the edge of the galaxy. The Senate has decided that the team will attempt to intercept _whatever_ is responsible for the act and bring it to justice.

Poe thinks it’s probably impossible. Shara Bey wouldn’t have backed down, though, so neither will he.

His father weeps over their holocall. Poe takes his BB unit with its abnormal loyalty subprogram and lovingly crafted selenium drive and leaves with a team comprised mostly of friends of his. No matter what they face, they’ll face it together.

* * *

The stars are going out.

Rey, hardly nineteen, though she wouldn’t be able to give her own age exactly, squats in the wreckage of an AT-AT. Nights and days alike on Jakku are generally cloudless, and there’s nothing around to obscure her view. She sees the stars going out, and she’s frightened. She can scavenge spare parts; she can clean them and get them in working order and trade them in and teach herself to fly using the simulator she found.

She can’t stop the stars going out.

 _It’s coming for you_ , she thinks, or someone thinks. The voice in her head is not her own. _You have to leave_.

 _No_ , Rey responds, her own voice clear in her mind. _My family will be coming back for me any day. They’re going to come get me_. _I’ll survive this with them._

Her thoughts are silent, and somehow, that’s worse.

* * *

The stars are going out.

A man crashes on Takodana and loses his memories. His origin, his history—even his name elude him.

As he stands before the burning wreckage of his ship, lucky to be alive even if he doesn’t have a scrap of identification on him, he thinks that he probably wants a drink or two. That’s how he comes to meet Maz Kanata, and once she catches sight of him, she won’t let him be.

“There’s something about you,” she says. She adjusts her glasses, crawling across a laden table to get up in his face.

“Look, I don’t know who you are,” the man says—he thinks he’s pronouncing the words right, but he’s not sure about anything anymore— “I don’t know who _I_ am. I just want a drink. That’s all. I don’t want any trouble—no trouble.”

Maz shakes her enormous yellow head and gets off the table when he refuses to meet her gaze. “I know your eyes,” she says. He wants to know what that means, but at the same time he very much _does not_ want to know. She leaves, but without credits or anything else besides the clothes on his back, he can’t get a drink. He lays down on the table and wallows in the twin feelings of _alone_ and _cold_ before coming up with a plan.

There are a couple of Jenet—he doesn’t know they’re called Jenet, but that’s what they are—who are headed for someplace called Jakku to trade supplies on their way to the Unknown Regions. He’s never been to Jakku (he thinks), but something in his gut tells him it’s nowhere he wants to go.

* * *

The stars are going out.

Luke meditates and finds Darkness—not the Dark Side of the Force, or even anything that appears to be part of the Force, but _Darkness_ _incarnate_. It’s nothing he’s seen before, and Luke has seen many, many things.

He packs lightly. He tells the oldest of his pupils, a Togruta named Ashayla Tano whose mother claimed to have trained under Anakin Skywalker, of his plans. Her training is not yet complete, but Luke has faith in her. The Force is strong within her.

“Continue their training,” Luke tells her. “May they grow wise and just under your watch.”

Ashayla nods. The Force ripples around her in waves, the only sign of her concern.

“Return to us safely, Master,” Ashayla says. “We’ll be waiting.”

Luke sets a course for Hosnian Prime. It’s been far too long since he’s seen his sister or his nephew, and he thinks of them constantly throughout the trip. He misses them both terribly. They haven’t spoken in years—almost a decade, now. Luke’s failure to identify Snoke put a near-end to his relationship with the rest of his family. It might have cost them dearly had the universe not had other plans.

Now, the stars are going out. If the galaxy must come to an end—if they cannot stop Starkiller—he would rather be at their side.

* * *

The stars are going out.

Even in the Outer Rim this has become common knowledge. The Hutts have used the discord to claim more territories while they still can, and the lawless regions have grown in number. There’s unrest everywhere one turns, and everywhere else besides.

Unlike the man who doesn’t remember his name on Takodana, Han _does_ have money, both credits and otherwise, so he drinks, and he drinks rather too much at that. He and Chewbacca are stopped at a cantina in Tatooine. They’re running niura, the latest synthetic spice: it’s some nasty combo stuff that Han wouldn’t dream of trying himself, but it’s hot and the buyers always pay—never credits, not that far out from the Core, but Han’s never put his faith in a single monetary system. He tells himself that he’ll stop when he finds the Millennium Falcon again. It’s the only thing standing between himself and a triumphant return.

 _Triumphant_. As if. Han orders another drink, finishes it. He hates Tatooine. He doesn’t know how Luke managed to grow up in such an inhospitable place. Most of it’s empty desert and moisture farms, and the rest’s the seediest gambling dens and races Han’s ever seen.

Chewbacca roars at him from across the bar. Han roars back, albeit in Basic. They’ve been arguing for days, and Han thinks it might be the end of their partnership. Han’s too old to smuggle anyway; he’s used every trick in every book on everybody. There’s no one left to swindle. Niura’s still good product, but for how long?

Chewbacca tells him to go home. When Han ignores him, Chewbacca leaves the cantina, and Han listens until he can no longer hear his friend’s footsteps.

That night’s a long one. Han feels something familiar in his gut, twisting and churning. If he had anyone to talk to, he’d say that he had a very bad feeling, but he doesn’t, so he remains silent. Han hasn’t been able to sleep well for years, but for the first time, the alcohol’s made it harder rather than easier to rest.

Han wonders about his son. He hasn’t seen him in so long—Ben longer than Leia, even. He misses them both. He’s missed so much.

If he waits too much longer, he’ll have missed everything because he’ll go up in radioactive dust the same as everyone else.

In the morning, Chewbacca asks if Han wants to sell their current ship and split the profits. He roars with joy when Han tells him they’re headed to the Core.

* * *

The stars are going out.

The Captain knows this, but it still comes as a surprise to see Rakata Prime’s sun disappearing before her very eyes.

It’s the strangest thing to watch. The sky’s brighter than it has any right to be, nearly blindingly white. The temperature hasn’t started to drop yet, but she’s read the reports; the planets don’t survive these kinds of attacks. Nothing does.

The Captain squints as she stares, unable to do anything else. Her shuttle is half a day’s walk away, parked on the other side of the biggest island she could find, and that’s assuming her associates haven’t decided to cut their losses and run off without her. There’s nowhere to go.

She sits on the beach, the waves lapping at her boots, and waits for the end of the world. This feels familiar somehow, as if she’s done this before. She takes off her helmet and feels the breeze on her forehead. It’s not something that she generally does on jobs, but she figures no one will know. None of the apparatus in the helmet can save her anyway.

The temperature starts to drop as the sky grows dark. She closes her eyes.


End file.
